
That leads to significant exposure and the occurrence of risks. Hence, long-term predictions are typically inaccurate or unreliable ( Flyvbjerg et al., 2007). Management systems often rely on experience and intuition rather than considering risks ( Qazi et al., 2016). Planning and development often ignore risks and uncertainties, whereby megaprojects become inflexible and vulnerable to unexpected events ( Giezen, 2012). Megaproject management challenges are related to accomplishing the project objectives given multiple requirements and expectations within a highly complex and uncertain environment, in which various sources of risks often exist ( Marrewijk, 2007). The academic literature needs to address further and identify these challenges and develop methodologies for properly handling them by building better management capabilities ( Söderlund et al., 2017).

Most megaprojects face multiple challenges throughout all phases over their lifetime. Such management drivers for challenges, failures, successes and lessons learned are highly impactful in industrial megaprojects and need to be further addressed by the academic literature. The literature also reports various lessons learned from past and present megaprojects, which ideally should be incorporated for enhanced future megaprojects. In this context, the effective use of a proper management system increases the success of megaprojects and has been the topic of multiple academic studies. Industrial megaprojects face numerous challenges in various areas and stages, which often lead to issues and failures in the economics, operations, social, environmental and political spheres. Hence, they are complicated to be efficiently implemented and control.


They are often developed and executed over multiple years and encompass a multi-scope decision-making process. Megaprojects represent a complex, unstable, non-linear, irregular, uncertain, unpredictable and highly dynamic environment. The full terms of this licence may be seen at Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Copyright © 2022, Salman Ashkanani and Robert Franzoi License
